The State of Sarah Palin

The peculiar political landscape of the Vice-Presidential hopeful.

Palin was elected governor just as the corruption scandal broke, and quickly took the opportunity to proclaim herself a reformer.Credit Barry Blitt

It rained a lot in Alaska this summer—even more than usual—and it was a cold summer, too. The sun doesn’t set on much of the state between mid-June and mid-July, but the weather was such that if you came from Outside, which is how Alaskans refer to the rest of the United States, and you happened to visit on a day that was fair, people would thank you for bringing the sunshine. If you were there to inquire into the political situation, people thanked you for that, too. They thanked you for coming, for hearing them out, and for not treating their story as a national joke. Many Alaskans enjoy being disconnected from the Lower Forty-eight, which is sometimes referred to as if it were a foreign country. There is pride in this sense of apartness, and that pride has been stung repeatedly since 2006, when the F.B.I. began raiding state lawmakers’ offices in an ever-expanding anti-corruption campaign. There have been indictments and guilty pleas. Oil-industry executives who were caught on videotape in the Baranof Hotel, in Juneau, the state capital, giving cash handouts to a state legislator have coöperated in pointing out other state legislators who liked to get paid before voting on oil-industry tax rates. Last year, the F.B.I. hit the home of Ted Stevens, Alaska’s six-term senator, and he became a favorite figure of ridicule on “The Daily Show”: an angry little man, with an uncanny resemblance to Mr. Magoo, who had once made himself seem even older than his eighty-plus years by describing the Internet as “a series of tubes”; Jon Stewart called him a “coot,” and portrayed him as a bully and a crook. As I travelled around Alaska in mid-August, Alaskans wanted me to understand that, sadly, he might well be all of that—and a very good thing for the state, too.

I booked a flight to the Ted Stevens Anchorage International Airport shortly after Stevens was indicted on, and pleaded not guilty to, seven felony charges for failing to report more than a quarter of a million dollars in gifts from the same oilmen who had bought much of the state legislature. I had to change planes in Las Vegas, but when I got there I was told that my flight to Anchorage had been cancelled, on account of a volcano in the Aleutian Islands that had erupted and “burped”—the technical term—a gigantic cloud of ash into the lower stratosphere. The cloud had drifted in a northeasterly direction and occupied much of the airspace over the Gulf of Alaska. More than five thousand travellers were stranded as a result. The next day, when the cloud moved and I completed my journey, I learned that, after a similar belch of ash choked out all four engines of a K.L.M. flight into Anchorage in 1989, Ted Stevens finagled an earmark on an appropriations bill to secure federal funds for the Alaska Volcano Observatory, whose missions included the monitoring of volcanic activity and its attendant hazards. The Alaska Volcano Observatory became a punch line on “The West Wing,” mocked as a ludicrous example of congressional pork, which is how it might sound until you think about your plane crashing.

So Ted Stevens may have saved my life—and that was something a great many Alaskans could say as they looked about at the roads and bridges, the hospitals and flood-control systems, the satellite weather and global-positioning relay stations, the sprawling Army and Air Force bases, the rural landing strips and postal air-cargo flights that sustain existence in Alaska as it enters its fiftieth year of statehood. Much of this infrastructure was the result of Stevens’s work on the Senate Appropriations and Armed Services Committees and its Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, and he made no apologies for his transactional approach to politics.* On the contrary, as he brought Alaska the highest number of federal dollars per capita in the nation, he boasted that he was doing his job. Still, Stevens’s decision to launch a reëlection campaign in the middle of a federal investigation required more than ordinary moxie.

The oilman at the center of the corruption scandal, Bill Allen, had agreed to testify against Stevens. The two men had once shared ownership of a racehorse, and had counted themselves good friends. Allen, a former welder and oilfield superintendent who came to Alaska from Texas and built a billion-dollar oilfield-services company, Veco Corporation, liked to be around other powerful men. He liked them to need him, and he had already claimed under oath that he had bribed Stevens’s son, Ben, a former state senator with a reputation for profiteering from government contracts his father had a hand in. For instance, Ben Stevens had received seven hundred and fifteen thousand dollars over three years from the Special Olympics, as the chief executive of the 2001 Winter Games in Anchorage, for which his father had brought millions of dollars in federal aid. Conflicted interests also hung heavily over Ben Stevens’s dealings regarding Alaska’s fisheries. He has said that he has done nothing illegal, yet the speculation in Alaska was not whether, but when, indictments would drop on him, and how they might affect his father’s fate. (Everyone was waiting, too, for charges to be filed against the state’s only congressman, Don Young, a man so ornery that he makes Stevens look affable. Young, who is seventy-five and has been in office almost as long as Stevens, was also running for reëlection, and he had so far spent more than a million dollars from his campaign war chest on lawyers, an expense that he would not explain except to say that being investigated gets pricey.)

With so much trouble encompassing Stevens, the desire for a seventh term had a brazen air of unreality about it. At his age? Why not go gently? That would not be the way of Ted Stevens, the dominant figure of Alaska’s fifty-year existence as a state. He is a man given to rages—he has said that they are an effective way to get what he wanted, and “I don’t lose my temper. I always know where it is.” He is also a man used to having enormous clout. On the eve of the millennium, he was named “Alaskan of the century,” and he is known as Alaska’s Senator-for-Life. Before his last run for office, he told the Anchorage newspaperman Michael Carey, “I just want people to understand the commitment I’m making if I stay on. This is a period I could go out and make a million dollars a year, without any question.” Stevens had by then made a lot of people rich. Evidently, he felt underpaid, and Bill Allen had been there to help out. This time around, his humble pitch to voters is: I’ve always been there for you; now I need you to come through for me.

“It’s the most momentous political season I’ve lived through in Alaska,” Pat Dougherty, the editor of the Anchorage Daily News, the state’s largest newspaper, told me—and that was three weeks before the governor, Sarah Palin, became the human cannonball of the Presidential campaign and blasted into overlapping orbits of political and tabloid super-celebrity. Just about everyone in Alaska knew that Palin was on John McCain’s list of potential running mates, but no one in the state’s insular, Republican political world had seen any indication that the campaign was checking her background. That made sense to Dougherty. Palin was forty-four years old and had served only a year and a half as governor, and he said, “The idea of her as Vice-President is ridiculous. She’d be way in over her head.”

Then again, two years ago Dougherty hadn’t considered Palin ready to be governor, even after she prevailed in the Republican primary against the deeply unpopular incumbent, Frank Murkowski, who had previously spent twenty-two years as Alaska’s junior senator. “We endorsed the Democrat in her race,” he said. “We didn’t think she had the experience.” Looking back, Dougherty allowed that he had underestimated Palin. After twenty months in office, she enjoyed an eighty-per-cent approval rating—the highest in the nation—and although he said he wouldn’t yet call himself an admirer, he described her performance as “great spectator sport.” Dougherty was particularly impressed by her tough, you-deal-with-Alaska-on-Alaska’s-terms attitude toward the big oil producers on whom the state’s economy largely depends.

Palin was elected governor just as Alaska’s political establishment was being realigned by the Veco bribery scandal. She had no role in exposing the corruption, but she was swift to see opportunity in the moment of crisis. The tainted politicians were being held to account, but hostility to the oil companies behind the corruption remained high. Since the nineteen-seventies, and the construction of the Trans-Alaska oil pipeline, major oil producers had enjoyed extraordinary influence over Alaskan lawmakers, and had pretty much dictated the terms on which they did business with the state. Under Frank Murkowski, the big oil companies had negotiated terms for the construction of a new pipeline that would allow for the extraction and conveyance to market of thirty-five trillion cubic feet of natural gas from Alaska’s North Slope; and it was in the context of the legislature’s votes on the gas pipeline that the F.B.I. had begun its corruption sting. When Palin arrived on the scene, Murkowski’s gas-line deal was dead, and she adopted another approach, cutting out the big oil producers in favor of a Canadian pipeline company. She counted it a great victory when, this summer, the legislature approved a framework for proceeding with the project.

“We’re not just gonna concede to three big oil companies of this monopoly—Exxon, B.P., ConocoPhillips—and beg them to do this for Alaska,” Palin told me last month in Juneau. “We’re gonna say, ‘O.K., this is so economic that we don’t have to incentivize you to build this. In fact, this has got to be a mutually beneficial partnership here as we build it. We’re gonna lay out Alaska’s must-haves. Parameters are gonna be set, rules are gonna be laid out, a law will encompass what it is that Alaska needs to protect our sovereignty, to insure it’s jobs first for Alaskans, and in-state use of gas’ ”—her list went on. In the past, she said, “Alaska was conceding too much, and chipping away at our sovereignty. And Alaska—we’re set up, unlike other states in the union, where it’s collectively Alaskans own the resources. So we share in the wealth when the development of these resources occurs.” And she said, “Our state constitution—it lays it out for me, how I’m to conduct business with resource development here as the state C.E.O. It’s to maximize benefits for Alaskans, not an individual company, not some multinational somewhere, but for Alaskans.”

Alaska is sometimes described as America’s socialist state, because of its collective ownership of resources—an arrangement that allows permanent residents to collect a dividend on the state’s oil royalties. It has been Palin’s good fortune to govern the state at a time of record oil prices, which means record dividend checks: two thousand dollars for every Alaskan. And because high oil prices also mean staggering heating bills in such a cold place—and because it’s always good politics to give money to voters—Palin got the legislature this year to send an extra twelve hundred dollars to every Alaskan man, woman, and child.

But, even as Palin enjoyed populist acclaim for her grand gestures—sharing the wealth and standing up to Big Oil—it was far from certain that the natural-gas pipeline, which she claimed as her proudest accomplishment, would ever get built. Palin had committed the state to risking half a billion dollars to help move the project forward, but there was no commitment from the producers to ship their gas through the line; without that, no one was willing to finance its construction. As Palin boasted of putting the big boys in their place, it looked increasingly likely that she would have to plead with them to return. In the meantime, Palin the reformer had been caught up in her own scandal, known as Troopergate.

The allegation was that Palin had dismissed her public-safety commissioner, a respected and well-liked officer named Walter Monegan, because Monegan had resisted pressure from her office to fire a state trooper named Michael Wooten. Wooten was Palin’s ex-brother-in-law, and his divorce from Palin’s sister Molly had involved an ugly custody battle that was not entirely resolved; it appeared that Palin had used her public office to settle a private family score. On July 28th, a bipartisan vote in the state legislature commissioned an investigation into the matter, at a cost of up to a hundred thousand dollars. Palin had invited it. “Hold me accountable,” she said. She promised full coöperation: “We would never prohibit, or be less than enthusiastic about, any kind of investigation. Let’s deal in the facts.”

On the day I stopped by Palin’s office in Juneau, she did not seem bothered that Alaska’s newspapers were filled with stories about Troopergate. Palin had just called a press conference to discuss the latest twist—a tape-recorded phone call from Frank Bailey, one of her closest aides, who could be heard trying to influence an officer to sack Trooper Wooten. “Todd and Sarah are scratching their heads, you know,” Bailey said, referring to the Governor and her husband, Todd Palin. “Why on earth hasn’t—why is this guy still representing the department? He’s a horrible recruiting tool. And, from their perspective, everybody’s protecting him.” Bailey, Palin’s director of boards and commissions, went on to convey the Governor’s displeasure, and urged action against Wooten. “She really likes Walt a lot,” Bailey said on the tape, referring to Monegan. “But on this issue she feels like it’s—she doesn’t know why there’s absolutely no action for a year on this issue. It’s very troubling to her and the family. I can definitely relay that.” At her press conference, Palin said she realized that the recording could be regarded as a “smoking gun.” She claimed that she had never asked Bailey or anyone else to make such calls on her behalf. “However,” she said, “the serial nature of the contacts understandably could be perceived as some kind of pressure, presumably at my direction.”

Palin, who studied journalism in college and worked for a time as a sportscaster, has an informal manner of speech, simultaneously chatty and urgent, and she reinforces her words with winks and nods and wrinklings of her nose that seem meant to telegraph intimacy and ease. Speaking recently at her former church, the Wasilla Assembly of God, she said, “It was so cool growing up in this church and getting saved here, getting baptized by Pastor Riley in Little Beaver Lake Camp, freezing-cold summer days that we had at camp—my whole family getting baptized when we were little.” She sounded the same when we met, high-spirited, irrepressible, and not in the least self-conscious. On the contrary, she is supremely self-confident, in the way of someone who believes that there is nothing she can’t talk her way into, or out of, or around or through. There was never a hesitation before speaking, or between phrases, no time for thought or reflection. The words kept coming—engaging, lulling, distracting—a commanding flow, but without weight. Yet, for all the cozy colloquialism, she cannot be called relaxed. She’s on—full on.

She said that one of her goals had been to combat alcohol abuse in rural Alaska, and she blamed Commissioner Monegan for failing to address the problem. That, she said, was a big reason that she’d let him go—only, by her account, she didn’t fire him, exactly. Rather, she asked him to drop everything else and single-mindedly take on the state’s drinking problem, as the director of the Alcoholic Beverage Control Board. “It was a job that was open, commensurate in salary pretty much—ten thousand dollars less”—but, she added, Monegan hadn’t wanted the job, so he left state service; he quit.

As for Frank Bailey’s phone call, Palin professed not to understand what it had to do with anything. “We just found out about it a couple of days ago,” she said. “And yeah, it’s very disturbing, and it’s an issue, and”—she began to speak as if Bailey were in the room and she were having it out with him: “You blundered, Bailey, and you know you did.” She said, “I’ll be talking to him,” and the next week she put Bailey on paid leave and ordered him to coöperate with the investigation. But that did not explain Bailey’s phone call. After all, Palin told me, “my husband made a call also. But, you know, there were death threats against a member of my family.” She said, “About my husband, his First Amendment rights, even—was that taken away once his spouse was elected governor?”

Palin continued, “Our security detail, when I first got elected, met with us and said, ‘Do you guys got any issues with any threats?’ ” To which Palin replied, “ ‘Yeah, well, by the way, there happens to be—the only threat that I knew of was one of your own troopers.’ And they’re, like, ‘Geez, this doesn’t sound good, you need to go tell your commissioner that.’ So I did. I shared that with the commissioner. So did Todd, and then Todd followed up to say”—at this point, Palin seemed to be quoting her husband: “ ‘We were interviewed back in ’05 before Sarah was even a candidate—what ever happened to that investigation, that interview? We know that the trooper’ ”—Wooten—“ ‘got to see the interview notes; well, we never have, and that’s kind of a scary position for us to be in. We complied with your request to bring you information on this trooper forward, and did we put our family in jeopardy by letting him see the interview notes about the illegal activities?’ ”

Palin insisted that Wooten “did have illegal activities. We witnessed them, and people have come to us with complaints. He Tasered his eleven-year-old stepson. This trooper, he was pulled over for drinking and driving and a witnessed open container in his car, and he did threaten to kill my dad—I heard him—and illegally shot a moose, which is a big darned deal here in Alaska.”

Trooper Wooten has admitted to Tasering the boy and shooting the moose, and he was disciplined for these things within the department, but, under the union contract, he could not be fired at the Governor’s whim. (He had been cleared of the threat to Palin’s father, but disciplined for drinking and driving, which he still denies.) It was obvious that this continued to frustrate Palin. She also seemed to forget that you should not talk about your affairs when they’re under investigation. Troopergate was the one subject about which she seemed keen to explicate the details. She wanted to persuade me that firing Walt Monegan had nothing to do with Trooper Wooten; that it was in no way a conflict of interest or an abuse of power. But, as she spoke, she seemed to be saying something else—that her vendetta against Wooten was wholly justified.

Compared with Ted Stevens’s impending criminal trial, the Troopergate investigation seemed like a sideshow—an added dash of intrigue in Alaska’s sensational political summer—except for the fact that Palin had always liked to present herself as a new kind of Alaskan politician, the kind who cleaned up after others’ shenanigans, not the kind who needed to be cleaned up after.

Palin’s record as the mayor of Wasilla, a town forty miles north of Anchorage, told a somewhat different story. According to “Sarah,” a biography by Kaylene Johnson, Palin had got into politics after she befriended the man who was then mayor and his police chief at a step-aerobics class. She made them her allies and ran for City Council. Then she challenged them for control of City Hall, and drove them out. As she purged her former friends and patrons, she denounced them as “good ol’ boys,” although her takeover of Wasilla had been aided from the start by Alaska’s Republican Party establishment.

Palin’s style of governing was unorthodox and at times impulsive. Although she boasts of a record as a fiscal conservative, she raised the sales tax while she was in office. She left the town saddled with millions of dollars in debt from the building of a new sports complex, and with legal fees, because she had failed to secure title to the land on which the complex was built. Casting herself in the Ted Stevens mold, however, she had proved herself skilled at collecting federal earmarks for Wasilla, bringing in twenty-seven million dollars for her small town in three years.

Palin’s biggest difference with Alaska’s Republican establishment, then, was not so much fiscal as it was social. Ted Stevens is one of the last of the Rockefeller Republicans—the real thing, as he supported Nelson Rockefeller over Barry Goldwater in the 1964 Presidential race. He is essentially secular and skeptical of government, and favors abortion rights—a common profile in Alaska, a state that attracts a strong streak of libertarians and rugged individualists. By contrast, Palin belongs to the state’s small evangelical community, which is centered in the Mat-Su Valley, around Wasilla. She thinks that creationism should be taught in the public schools alongside Darwinian evolution, she was called the town’s “first Christian mayor” by a local TV station, and she asked the town librarian about banning books, but did not follow through.

As governor, Palin has done nothing to impose her religious or social views. Alaska has no death penalty, and during the campaign she said that she would support one, but never made an issue of it; she opposed abortion even for pregnancies caused by rape, but this was a personal opinion, not a legislative cause. In fact, she refused requests to put abortion bills on the agenda during a special legislative session this summer, preferring to discuss the natural-gas pipeline, which she pursued in such a bipartisan manner that she ultimately won more solid support for it from Democrats than from Republicans. While Republicans hold most of the state’s top political posts, only twenty-five per cent of Alaskan voters are registered Republicans. Fifteen per cent are Democrats, and three per cent belong to the Alaska Independence Party—the extremist states’ rights, quasi-secessionist faction to which Todd Palin once pledged his allegiance. A solid majority of Alaska’s electorate claims no party affiliation. Alaskans kept telling me that Alaskans vote for the person, not the party.

So it was startling to see Palin emerge in the last days of August as an icon of the evangelical base of the Republican Party, and as a fierce—often vituperative—partisan scourge, mocking Barack Obama’s character and positions. It was startling, too, to hear her, in her début speech to the Republican National Convention, reading a script that consistently distorted her own record. She said that she had put her predecessor’s jet for sale on eBay, which was true, except that this is how government property was often disposed of in Alaska, and the plane didn’t sell online; it had to be unloaded through a private deal, at a loss of half a million dollars.

Palin also said that she told Congress “thanks but no thanks” for the notorious Bridge to Nowhere—a Ted Stevens and Don Young earmark project that had long been a target of John McCain’s ridicule. (The bridge, which would have cost nearly four hundred million dollars, was intended to provide access from one island to an airport on a smaller island, with a population of fifty people.) In reality, Palin had supported the bridge in her gubernatorial race, even after Congress revoked the earmark, but abandoned it following the election and directed the money Alaska had received to other projects.

And, of course, Palin touted her gas-pipeline project. “I fought to bring about the largest private-sector infrastructure project in North American history,” she said. “And, when that deal was struck, we began a nearly forty-billion-dollar natural-gas pipeline to help lead America to energy independence.” That was not entirely accurate. She was still waiting for the state legislature to release the five hundred million dollars she’d promised the pipeline company to help pay for administrative costs. But the crowd loved it. Many of the delegates wore lapel buttons that said, “Coldest State, Hottest Governor.”

That same week, Rick Davis, McCain’s campaign manager, announced, “This election is not about issues.” What mattered, he said, was the “composite view” that voters would form of the candidates. On a talk show, the Washington bureau chief of Time told Nicole Wallace, a McCain spokesperson, that it was still unclear whether Palin was ready “to answer tough questions about domestic policy, foreign policy.” Wallace laughed. “Like from who? From you?” And she asked, “Who cares if she can talk to Time magazine?”

Attacking the press is nothing new in the playbook of political defense, but it took a bold twist when the McCain campaign contrived to transform a family problem—the pregnancy of Palin’s unmarried seventeen-year-old daughter, Bristol—into a vindication of Palin’s Christian family values. Surely, it had not been part of McCain’s plan for his untested Vice-Presidential pick to start Day Four of her rollout by announcing Bristol’s plans to marry the baby’s father, Levi Johnston, who, as the Times reported, recently dropped out of high school. The campaign said that it was going public in order to quash offensive rumors that were circulating on the Internet: that Sarah Palin’s five-month-old baby, Trig, who has Down syndrome, was not really hers but Bristol’s, and that the Governor had faked her pregnancy in order to cover for her unwed daughter. This Faulknerian story had been making the rounds in Alaska for months—I heard versions of it in Anchorage and Juneau within twenty-four hours of arriving in each city—and it derived from the peculiar circumstances surrounding Trig’s birth.

Sarah Palin had not announced her pregnancy until she was seven months along. A month later, she was in Texas to address a conference when her water broke. She decided to give the speech and then return to Wasilla to deliver the child. By way of explaining this all-day odyssey (most obstetricians advise against air travel in the eighth month, never mind during labor, and most airlines forbid it), Todd Palin later remarked, “You can’t have a fish picker”—a commercial fisherman—“from Texas.”

The Palin family’s press release, congratulating Bristol and welcoming their prospective son-in-law to the family, was a way for the McCain campaign to suggest that the gutter press had so violated this family’s privacy with its calumnies that it was necessary to violate the girl’s privacy to set the record straight. By castigating the press, the campaign was able to broadcast the family melodrama in a self-righteous manner. Even better, the story of the troubled teens of Wasilla, Alaska, managed to change the subject from a debate about John McCain’s seemingly impulsive abandonment of what had been the premise of his campaign: experience and national security.

Sarah Palin’s makeover was just beginning, but the campaign had scored a critical victory: the press, in asking about the least-known potential President in recent memory, had been made to look contemptible. When, at last, Palin appeared at the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, most of the forty million Americans who watched her on TV were seeing her for the first time.

The control of Palin by the McCain campaign was one of many ways in which it transformed her into someone largely unrecognizable to people who knew her in Alaska, where she hadn’t shown a great interest in national economic issues other than energy policy, or in international affairs, and where she was viewed as more often seeking the attention of the press than avoiding it. For her first two weeks on the Presidential ticket, Palin was kept cocooned by handlers, except at rallies, where she read an adumbrated version of her Convention speech over and over, even as many of its claims were being debunked. When a Fox News anchor demanded to know when she could be interviewed, Rick Davis explained that he would allow access only to reporters who showed “deference.”

A few weeks earlier, when I telephoned Palin’s office in Juneau and asked for a press officer, I was invited to meet the Governor the next day. The state legislature was in recess at the time, and I found Palin sitting sidesaddle on her receptionist’s desk, studying the receptionist’s family photographs. She wore slacks and a belted sweater-jacket, and her hair was piled and pinned atop her head in her trademark upsweep. She kept up the family chitchat as she led me to her office. Her press person had told me that I could have twenty minutes of the Governor’s time, but, once we were alone, she was in no hurry. We talked for about an hour before an aide poked her head in to announce that someone else was waiting.

Palin wanted to be seen as someone eager to change things fast. “I’m halfway through my term,” she said. “Maybe you saw the clock as you walk in. It tells me how many days we have to make a difference. I’ve got, like, eight hundred and forty-three days to make a difference left? Halfway through!”

As a public speaker, Palin was known for expressing goals and voicing good intentions with gusto, if with few specifics. As she talked about her hopes for Alaska, she often seemed to skip from slogan to slogan without ever touching solid ground. I mentioned at one point that I had met several Alaskans who described the state’s relationship to Washington as that of a colony—rich in resources, governed from afar, and dependent on that distant power to sustain it—and I asked how the state could survive without the sort of federal appropriations that Ted Stevens had fought for relentlessly and that John McCain has made a cause of denouncing.

“I see us as the most unique state in the union,” Palin replied. “I sure wish that we could be recognized as the head and not the tail of the U.S., because we should be the head—literally and figuratively.” She continued, “Alaska could lead with the energy policy, we should be the head. So I don’t see us as a colony but just extremely unique, and I say Alaskans, too, we have such a love, a respect for our environment, for our lands, for our wildlife, for our clean water and our clean air. We know what we’ve got up here and we want to protect that, so we’re gonna make sure that our developments up here do not adversely affect that environment at all. I don’t want development if there’s going to be that threat to harming our environment.”

She paused for a moment and said that her administration had filed a friend-of-the-court brief in an ongoing lawsuit related to the Exxon Valdez oil spill, in 1989. “We’re putting our money where our mouth is to prove that we’re committed to the safe, responsible, environmentally friendly developments that must take place,” she said. “Otherwise, we’re never gonna convince Congress and the rest of the nation, especially people on the East Coast, who seem to make a lot of decisions for us—we’ll never convince them that we are willing and able to develop to get in that position of being producers and contributors for the rest of the U.S. So we have to prove that. That answers the colonist type of question.”

Palin likes to talk about the environment, but her view on drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is the opposite of the one held by Congress and by McCain, who said, early in his campaign, “As far as ANWR is concerned, I don’t want to drill in the Grand Canyon, and I don’t want to drill in the Everglades. This is one of the most pristine and beautiful parts of the world.” Palin suggested that McCain might change his mind on the issue, as he has on the subject of offshore drilling. When it came to offshore drilling, she said, “McCain now is evolved.”

At one point, she said, “We love our polar bears.” She had just got through explaining why she opposed a ban on aerial wolf shooting. In the past decade or so, Alaska’s voters have twice rejected this practice—the chasing and gunning down of wolves from small planes—and on both occasions the state reauthorized it. Now the anti-wolf-shooting crowd had forced a third referendum on the issue, and Palin, who kept a pair of wolf pelts hanging on her office wall, behind a cradle swing for Trig, was keen to see the initiative fail.

“It’s not aerial hunting,” she claimed. “What the state has been engaged in for the past four to six years—and I support—is predator control.” Shoot the wolves, she said, and moose and caribou herds will increase, providing more food for Alaskans. That was the argument: “Let the people who live off those herds not buy and import meat.” In Alaska, a state that is equivalent in size to a fifth of the continental United States and doesn’t have much agriculture, such self-reliance—hunting or fishing to feed yourself and your family—is known as subsistence, and subsistence is widely held by Alaskans to be a fundamental right. “It’s an emotional issue,” Palin said.

Polar bears were more of a pocketbook issue. Even as she professed her affection for them, Palin had, in early August, filed suit against Dirk Kempthorne, the United States Secretary of the Interior, seeking to reverse his decision to list the polar bear as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act. The animals were on the list because scientists—working for the federal government—had found that the effects of global warming on arctic ice made it possible that polar bears would become endangered in the foreseeable future. Palin takes a wary view of such science. She has doubts that global warming is caused by human activity. She called the dire polar-bear population projections “just not credible.”

The Interior Department had already allowed for oil and gas exploration in the polar bears’ habitat, but Palin saw the listing of the polar bear as an intolerable precedent. “Then where do we go?” she asked. “It’ll be another species and then another. Next it’s a seal, or next it’s a bird, or it’s a fish, and the next thing you know that would certainly lock up Alaska’s ability to live by its statehood pact to develop its resources and contribute to the rest of the United States.”

In her inaugural address as governor, Palin pledged to put “Alaska first”—and now she is running in a Presidential campaign whose slogan is “Country first.” For a governor from another state, this might be an easy rhetorical adjustment, but Alaska is more like another country—and its most popular politicians, shady as some might otherwise be, are like patriots, Alaska patriots, who navigate the choppy narrows between the fear that the federal government will restrict Alaskans’ freedom and the fear that the federal government will cut them loose.

Ralph Seekins, a former state senator who runs the Ford dealership in Fairbanks and serves on the Republican National Committee, told me, “There’s a natural suspicion among most Alaskans of the federal government, and the leader of the resistance against that federal government is Ted Stevens.” It was a curious description of a man who had done more than any other to wring from the federal budget the funds to make Alaska thrive and grow toward self-sufficiency. But it made sense. Confronted with the choice between subsistence and subsidy, the Alaska patriot has traditionally favored the pragmatic compromise: subsidized subsistence.

Sarah Palin seemed to understand this. Earlier this year, she wrote in a newspaper column, “The federal budget, in its various manifestations, is incredibly important to us, and congressional earmarks are one aspect of this relationship.” And, for all her talk of Alaska fending for itself, she told me, “There isn’t a need to aspire to live without any earmarks. The writing on the wall, though, is that times are changing. Presidential candidates have promised earmark reform, so we gotta deal with it, we gotta live with it, understanding that our senior senator, especially—he’s eighty-four years old, he is not gonna be able to serve in the Senate forever. We will not have that seniority back there anymore.” Suddenly she called out, “Alaskans, wake up!” Then she went on, “That means we have got to get ourselves in a position of seizing opportunities to develop and pay our own bills. ’Cause we’re not gonna see that largesse coming to our state as we had in all these years. Whether we like that or not or support that or not, that’s reality.”

By speaking only of Stevens’s age, Palin had skated around the possibility that his legal troubles might end his career in the Senate. She had not hesitated to call for state legislators to resign when they were indicted for corruption, and she had said that it was time for Don Young to go, even though he has not been indicted. But with Stevens she was uncharacteristically cautious. She said, “I feel like I would be kind of stepping out of bounds, being extremely and prematurely judgmental of Senator Stevens when I don’t know as much as I do know about our state lawmakers who, yes, once they were indicted, I said, ‘You guys gotta step aside.’ ”

Stevens has long been a favorite target of John McCain’s anti-pork campaign, so it must have been strange for McCain to see Stevens get a sizable boost in his prospects for reëlection after Palin joined the Presidential ticket. But that may not matter. Stevens is due to go to trial in Washington, D.C., between now and Election Day, and, if the case against him remains strong, he is not likely to return to the Senate in January. If Stevens loses, it will be as an Alaska patriot to the end, whereas if Sarah Palin finds herself on the winning ticket it will require her to have shifted her loyalty away from Alaska first.

One day, I flew due west from Anchorage to the town of Bethel, on the flat, drab sprawl of waterlogged tundra that reaches between the deltas of the Yukon and Kuskokwim Rivers to the shore of the Bering Sea. Bethel, a town of some six thousand souls, is the mercantile and administrative hub for fifty-six Alaska Native villages staggered through the surrounding bush. There are no roads to Bethel; it can be reached only by sea and air, and the prices of goods for sale there reflect the journey—nine dollars and ninety-nine cents for a gallon of milk, seven dollars or more for a gallon of gasoline. When the economy is weak in Bethel, as it has been of late, the population drops—some people move to Anchorage or Fairbanks and others head upriver to their ancestral villages to live on fish and game and berries and bird eggs.

I travelled an hour by boat up the Kuskokwim to the village of Kwethluk, a collection of rough wood shacks and a couple of Russian Orthodox churches, without plumbing or running water. There I met Max Olick, the local law-enforcement officer, a huge man with a wad of snuff under his lip and a cap that read “Sheriff.” “Pretty soon it’s moose season,” Olick said. “One moose will carry me one year. We don’t have pork chops and chicken. I hate chicken. My boy is different. He prefers something more than the native foods we’ve been having all our life. I don’t know where I went wrong with him.” He said, “I told my wife we live in the Third World. She laughed. She said we have TV. I said what about water and sewer.” Then he laughed. I asked him what he thought about Ted Stevens. “Long as I can remember—forty years—I’ve known his name,” Olick said. “Forty years, I voted for him. He was doing great for Alaska.” He explained, “Here in Kwethluk, there’s about nine hundred and twenty people. We like Stevens because he knows what we want. What we care about is subsistence.” He replenished his snuff and said, “Stevens has been a great supporter of subsistence life style, economic development. He’s been in there so many years he deserves a chance to go at it one more term. But I don’t think anyone can condone corruption in Washington, D.C.” Olick thought about that awhile, and said, “I’m an old traditional guy that still believes in old traditional ways. But things change.”

Back in Bethel, I met a dentist, a man who ran a janitorial-supplies service, and a man who ran a fuel service. I asked them how they thought Bethel and the villages it supported would fare without Ted Stevens in the Senate, in a time without earmarks. The dentist said, “We’re fucked,” and the janitorial-supplies man said, “There will be ghost towns.” The fuel-oil man pointed to a hard black, jagged, wedge-shaped object on his desk, and asked if I knew what kind of tooth it was. “Mastodon,” he said. ♦

*Correction, December 12, 2008: Stevens was not a member of the Armed Services Committee, as previously stated.

Philip Gourevitch has been a regular contributor to The New Yorker since 1995, and a staff writer since 1997.